Netymology
From Apps to Zombies: A Linguistic Celebration of the Digital World
Published on 28. March 2013
Book
Hardback
272 pages
978-1-78087-993-2 (ISBN)
Description
Composed of 100 bite-sized entries of 400 to 600 words each, Netymology weaves together stories, etymologies and analyses around digital culture's transformation, and creation, of words. Tom Chatfield presents a kaleidoscopic, thought-provoking tour through the buried roots of some of the digital age's most common terms: from the @ and Apple symbols, to HTML and Trojan horses, to the twisted histories of new forms of slang, memes, text messages and gaming terms. There's also discussion of the trends behind digital words, and of the ways language itself is being shaped by new forces - and revelations about how these forces are, in turn, reshaping us.
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
London
United Kingdom
Target group
College/higher education
Professional and scholarly
Dimensions
Height: 222 mm
Width: 138 mm
ISBN-13
978-1-78087-993-2 (9781780879932)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Other editions
Additional editions
E-Book
03/2013
1st Edition
Quercus
€3.99
Available for download
Person
Tom Chatfield is the author of four previous books of non-fiction exploring digital culture. Tom is also a fortnightly columnist for the BBC, a TED veteran, international speaker and broadcaster, and has worked with some of the world's leading technology firms. He took a doctorate and taught at St John's College, Oxford, before moving to write in London.
Content
Introduction. Computers. Signs of our times. Marking up. The burning power of a name. Myths and monsters. Speak, memory. Why wiki? Buffed-up gamers. Very, very big and very, very small. The names of domains. Rise of the robots. Cyber-everything. Three-letter words. Everyone's an avatar. On memes. Hacking through the net. Do you grok it? Sock puppets and astroturf. Bluetooth. The Cupertino effect. The Scunthorpe problem. The coming of the geeks. Beware of the troll. Bitten by bugs. Bits, bytes and other delights. Twinks, twinked and twinking. Talking less about a trees. ZOMGs, LOLZ. Happy pew pew to you. Lifehacking. The multitasking illusion. The Streisand effect. Acute cyberchondria. Casting the media net. Bionic beings and better. Technological black holes. Google and very big numbers. Status anxiety. The zombie computing apocalypse. The pwn and be pwned. Learning to speak. Emoticons. Getting cyber-sexy. Slacktivism and the pajamahadeen. Gamification and the art of persuasion. Sousveillance. Phishing, phreaking and phriends. Spamming for victory. Gurus and evangelists. CamelCase. The Blogosphere and Twitterverse. Phat loot and in-game grinding. Meta-. TL;DR. Apps. Fanboys and girls. Welcome to the Guild. Facepalms and *acting out*. Finding work as a mechanical Turk. Geocaching. The beasts of Baidu. Snowclones. Typosquatting. Egosurfing and Googlegangers. Infovores, digerati and hikikomori. Planking, owling and horsemanning. Unfriend, unfavourite (and friends). Sneakernets and meatspace. Going viral. Dyson spheres and digital dreams. Welcome to teh interwebs. On good authority. A world of hardware. Darknets, mysterious onions and bitcoins. Nets, webs and capital letters. Praying to Isidore and tweeting the Pope. QWERTY and Dvorak. Apples are the only fruit. Eponymous branding. Mice, mousse and grafacons. Meh. Learn Olbanian! Booting and rebooting. Cookie monsters. Going digitally native. Netiquette and netizens. The names of the games. Flash crowds, mobs, and the slashdot effect. Godwin's law. From Beta to Alpha to Golden Master. Mothers and daughters, masters and slaves. Bit rot. Non-printing characters. Wise web wizards. Disk drives. Easter eggs. Microsoft family names. Why digital? Filing away our data. Artificial Intelligence and Turing tests. ... and finally. Acknowledgements. Select bibliography and further reading. Notes and references.