so the other night at dinner i had the second conversation in my life where a european expressed complete alarm and not-very-cloaked disdain at the adoption of the word “informatics” by the english-speaking community as a way of describing this field we are shaping with a slightly more human focus than tends to come to mind when we think of “computers” or “information science”.
this is because “informatique” is already a word, and it is pretty much synonymous with computer science in europe. so the argument that “we needed a name that isn’t already laden with techie connotations” just holds absolutely no water at all.
i’m not saying this is the biggest concern facing the field, and it seems quite possible to just make the argument that shaking things up in the english-speaking world is a step in the right direction even if we have to think of another word elsewhere, but it also seems good to acknowledge that it confuses some people. yesterday the brit at the ischool panel said something like “we like the word ‘informatics’ because it doesn’t really mean anything, so we can define it however we want”, and that’s funny, but people also do take it to heart in a way, and it was a bit jarring to me because i had been talking the night before with someone just a hop over to the continent from that guy who had a very different perspective.

whoa it took 74 light years to post this, because the internet went down, and then it was lunch.
woohoo, lunch!
more on that in a bit.
this post is too old, already

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 3:11 pm and is filed under chi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.