Scream my name
As has been widely reported, the company formerly known as Facebook is undergoing a high-profile rebrand. It is getting a new logo and changing its name. The new moniker is slick, professional and just a teensy bit shouty. Yes, Facebook is now FACEBOOK.
Feedback is EXCITED, but also wonders whether the diminishing appeal of Facebook – sorry, FACEBOOK – to younger social media users will be revived by a name that looks like it was written by a troll who forgot to disable caps lock on their keyboard.
Perhaps reflecting this, not all of FACEBOOK’s services will be known as FACEBOOK. The networking site formerly known as Facebook will continue to be known as Facebook, although it will now be run by FACEBOOK. Meanwhile, formerly Facebook-owned entities such as WhatsApp and Instagram will carry the upgraded FACEBOOK logo.
Advertisement
Although now confused, Feedback believes in experts, and isn’t one to gainsay the wisdom of no doubt highly recompensed marketing gurus. So henceforth, please: this column is brought to you by FEEDBACK.
AI tipping point
ANYONE WHO HAS WATCHED – OK, NOW HOW DO WE TURN THIS OFF? Anyone who has watched the viral videos of Boston Dynamics’ robots will have been impressed by the grace of these machines under pressure. In very nearly the words of tubthumping Brit band Chumbawamba, they get knocked down, but they get up again. How have their creators imbued them with such a human-like ability to recover from being unbalanced?
The company’s CEO, Marc Raibert, let the secret slip : child experimentation. “I have video of pushing on my daughter when she was one year old, knocking her over, getting some grief,” he said. “She was teetering and tottering and learning to balance and I just wanted to see what would happen.”
Raibert says he and his daughter remain “good pals”. But clearly this isn’t an approach best repeated, let alone taken any further. We don’t want Jeff Bezos, say, sticking a toddler in a cardboard box to test Amazon’s delivery methods, nor Elon Musk tossing children in the air to see which way up they land.
Best new words
Collins Dictionary has named “climate strike” as 2019’s word of the year in a sign that the world is getting more worried about global warming and less worried about what constitutes a word.
Doubling down on its insistence that two-word phrases count, the dictionary included “double down” on its shortlist. This isn’t a reference to a trend towards better-stuffed pillows, FEEDBACK is disappointed to learn, but rather to the tendency of figures in power caught saying something wrong to cover it up by saying something even wronger.
FEEDBACK – it’s already getting a bit exhausting, isn’t it? – feels that the usual approach of highlighting new words coined to match existing meanings is old hat. Why not instead recognise existing words whose meanings have miraculously changed to reflect new realities?
First nominees include: Glacier (noun) – formerly a mighty, slow-moving river of ice, now a small, sad trickle of microplastic-infused water.
FACEBOOK (proper noun; also “Facebook”) – formerly a social-media platform populated by updates from friends and family, and cute cat videos, now a social-media platform populated by unfocused rage, Russian trolls and cute cat videos.
Self-partner (verb) – formerly an activity unmentionable in print, now a synonym for being single. As in: “I’m self-partnering. Why are you looking at me like that?”
If you have encountered other neologisms that deserve our attention, do please let us know.
Mordaunt humour
As already hinted, the web can be a nasty place, full of harassment, abuse and thousands of people making the same joke about self-partnering. Former UK defence secretary Penny Mordaunt has put her head above the parapet with a plan to combat it. The current prospective parliamentary candidate for Portsmouth North is campaigning for six new emojis to be added to the existing lexicon, which she hopes will contribute to a kinder, gentler cyberspace.
Feedback’s favourite is a teal sphere, mouth turned down in tearful disappointment, raising a single finger as if to admonish a wayward child. Mordaunt has christened this sad ball of frustration “That won’t do…”, and suggests it could help netizens put racists, misogynists and general trolls back in their place.
Feedback has no intention of contributing to the culture of abuse that Mordaunt so rightly condemns. But knowing netizens as we do, our response must be a sad, finger-wagging teal emoji.
Spinning clocks
We have received many excellent proposals for how to describe clockwise and counterclockwise for Generation Z students unfamiliar with analogue clocks (2 November). There was one outstanding contender: clockwise is the direction of the spinning animation often displayed while waiting for a computer program to perform an action such as loading a video. We learn that this is called a “throbber” in the trade, and look forward to “counterthrobberwise” featuring in 2020’s words of the year.
You can send stories to Feedback by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address.