Whorf as Applied to "Technology Space"

                The other day, I called my dad on the phone. He couldn’t hear me and so he said, “We’ve got a bad connection, do you want to call back?” I did, mostly because he couldn’t hear me, so there was no point trying to point out how silly that is. I was reminded of Whorf’s theory of language, and I will explain why.

                Perhaps you’ve never thought about it, but how clear a cell phone connection has only to do with location. Therefore, the connection you supposedly “get” is metaphorical. You cannot grasp the connection, and whether it is clear or not isn’t simply random chance. But according to Whorf, the way we talk about something has an effect on how we think about it, an idea which is very clear in my father’s suggestion to call back. According to the way we speak about cell phone connections, it would seem that there is an imaginary bowl of connections, and when we make a call, we grab one of them at random. According to this logic, it makes perfect sense that if the connection on a call is bad, you should try your luck again and hope that you pull a better connection out of the imaginary bowl the second time around. In this way, the metaphorical space has crossed into the boundary of physical space through language use. Because we treat both physical and metaphorical space the same way linguistically, they have a tendency to become blended to us. It is not that we cannot see the distinction, but the line becomes fuzzy, and we have to actively think about it in order to see how the two are different.

                A similar argument can be made concerning how people understand computers, particularly in terms of why they slow down. I was talking to my friend, a Computer Science major, about what people commonly say when they ask him to fix their computers. Apparently, people will often say that they think their computers are getting slow because they are “getting full”. The comparison, it would seem, is that the computer is like a man with a bag, and he is burdened by the heavy load, and therefore he’s going to be moving slower. But that’s just not right; that’s not how the computer works. Here’s a very brief explanation of what is really going on: as the computer gets older, it doesn’t really slow down at all. Rather, the newer programs and applications are more advanced and are trying to do more. The old processor was never designed for this, and therefore it will be overly-taxed by the new programs and appears to run slower as a result- even though in terms of actual data processed it is running at the same speed. So what would Whorf say about this? The language used treats the computer as one entity, and in some ways it is. However, when people talk about a computer, they are simultaneously talking about the hard drive, processor, RAM, graphics card, etc. When they fail to talk about each of them separately, they think that the functions are all inherently linked. Hence, you get the metaphor of the man carrying around the sack. In this case, the man is the processor and the bag is the memory. People talk about the computer as though the man is required to carry this bag at all times. But in reality, the bag is off somewhere else, and therefore has absolutely nothing to do with the man and his ability to move about and complete tasks, because the two are entirely different entities. In this way, the way we talk about the computer has warped our understanding of the nature and function of a computer. I would be curious to see if there is a language in which the units of a computer are all linked together. I argue that if there were such a language, the average native speaker would have a much better understanding of how computers work, and would not make the mistake that computers get slow because they get “full”.